> The US does this, and US lawyers understand this. If I open an online poker and sports bookmaking site in the UK (where such sites are completely legal), and take business from all over the United States thereby breaking federal law, I can expect to be met at the plane door the next time I take a shopping trip to NYC.
Countries do things like this when they're run by fools and they can do this because the fools have weapons and prisons. What good has it done the US? Can US patrons of offshore internet Bitcoin casinos no longer find them available? Not a chance.
But then on top of being completely ineffective, it causes exactly what you're saying -- other fools in other countries want to treat the foolishness as precedent for doing it themselves.
Which is why the people in the various countries should put a stop to all of it, before it spreads and they find themselves in a foreign prison because their flight had a layover in a country with a law they didn't know about. And countries themselves should retaliate like hell whenever anyone tries to do it to one of their citizens.
That's the crucial part. Lots of people who do business in other countries either want to, or need to, visit the US from time to time. Whether for a "shopping trip to NYC", or for business reasons. That's why it's a big deal when the US wants somebody.
On the other hand, I'm not particularly concerned about some tyrannical regime on the other side of the world that doesn't like the kind of content I have on my site. I'll postpone the research until I actually need to fly over their airspace or something.
Where does the UK currently stand in the spectrum between "country that everyone wants to visit sometime" and "country that nobody gives a fuck about"? It used to be firmly on the former side, but it seems to be drifting away to the latter side every year.
> That's the crucial part. Lots of people who do business in other countries either want to, or need to, visit the US from time to time.
That doesn't do them any good because the set of people who never intend to set foot in the US is still vastly larger than the number of people required to set up an offshore internet casino.
> On the other hand, I'm not particularly concerned about some tyrannical regime on the other side of the world that doesn't like the kind of content I have on my site. I'll postpone the research until I actually need to fly over their airspace or something.
Most people can't even name every country, much less tell you what their laws are. And then you'll be breaking them without even knowing, and if that's regarded as a legitimate reason to incarcerate someone then what are you supposed to do? Suppose you have to choose between a layover in Egypt or in Hungary, do you even know which one's laws you might have broken at any point in your life?
> Where does the UK currently stand in the spectrum between "country that everyone wants to visit sometime" and "country that nobody gives a fuck about"? It used to be firmly on the former side, but it seems to be drifting away to the latter side every year.
The problem is if you get on a flight to Paris you have no control over whether it might get diverted to London.
If diverting planes becomes a big enough problem for ordinary businesspeople and not just prominent opponents of certain dictators, I'm sure someone will build an app that helps us plan flights accordingly. Traveling from the US to France and need to avoid UK airspace? Sure, let's take a quick layover in Spain. Have you done any of the following things in the last x years? OK, we'll make a big detour around China this time.
Don't let slippery slope arguments take you into the dystopian future quicker than the world itself seems to be willing to.
> If diverting planes becomes a big enough problem for ordinary businesspeople and not just prominent opponents of certain dictators, I'm sure someone will build an app that helps us plan flights accordingly. Traveling from the US to France and need to avoid UK airspace? Sure, let's take a quick layover in Spain. Have you done any of the following things in the last x years? OK, we'll make a big detour around China this time.
There are two major problems with this.
The first is that you don't actually know which countries you have to avoid. There isn't going to be an app that can walk you through every law in every country.
And the second is that you're not the one flying the plane. You thought you were going to Charles de Gaulle but the weather in Paris is worse than expected or some drunk driver crashed the gate and drove out onto the runway and they're diverting all the planes, so after you're already in the air you find out you're actually going to Heathrow.
> Don't let slippery slope arguments take you into the dystopian future quicker than the world itself seems to be willing to
They already do stuff like this. The fact that they do it is now being used as a justification for doing it more and elsewhere. You can watch people telling you that slippery slope is a fallacy as they're greasing the hill.
> And the second is that you're not the one flying the plane. You thought you were going to Charles de Gaulle but the weather in Paris is worse than expected or some drunk driver crashed the gate and drove out onto the runway and they're diverting all the planes, so after you're already in the air you find out you're actually going to Heathrow.
Such a system would presumably account for possible diversions and plot your flight accordingly.
And yes, that is a thing that some of us do actually need. For example, while I have lived in the West for the past 18 years, I'm still a Russian citizen, and if I ever set foot there again they will likely have some questions for me regarding all the money for the war effort in Ukraine (see Ksenia Karelina for an example). Thus I would very much appreciate the ability to book a flight that is guaranteed to not be diverted to Russia or to any country that is likely to extradite to Russia, and I would pay money for such a service.
> Such a system would presumably account for possible diversions and plot your flight accordingly.
I mean, that's fine if you want to avoid Russia while flying from California to Quebec, but you don't really need an app for that one. Whereas if you're within the plane's fuel supply of where you don't want to be, how are you supposed to know ahead of time what kind of nonsense is going to happen while you're in the air?
The plane could have a navigation failure over the ocean and end up arbitrarily far off course. Some first class VIP could have a medical problem which is going to force the plane to divert anyway and then the nearest city with the right kind of hospital is in the place you don't want to be. And what if you end up St. Petersberg not because you had a layover in Finland but because Helsinki was your intended destination?
You can't account for any possible contingency obviously, but you can still account for most. Start with just determining possible diversions on the route as it is supposed to be. That route can in turn be replaced with a heatmap of historical routes the planes on it have actually taken. And so on. The point is to not be on a plane that can be diverted to a country where you really can't end up at any likely point of its regular route.
I can't think of a single case other than Ryanair 4978, a plane that was carrying a Belarusian opposition activist over Belarusian airspace. Not saying this was justified in any way, but even Belarus didn't dare to touch any foreign passengers.
If you're aware of any actual case of a first-world airliner from country A being forced to land in country B to have a citizen of country C arrested, please provide links.
Since we don't use cold-war classifications like 'first-world' anymore, I'll refer simply to National Airlines with long-established US and European route access from country A being forced to land in country B to have a citizen of country C arrested.
This excludes the (arguably contentious) incidents like:
- 1954 in Israel where forced a Syrian passenger plane to land in order to gain hostages which it then hoped to exchange for captured Israeli soldiers.
- 2012 in Turkey grounded a Syrian plane in 2012 in order to detain and transfer a suspect to the US.
- 2016 in Ukraine grounded a plane with military jets to have a citizen of country C arrested
Bolivian president's jet
- Bolivian president's jet rerouted amid suspicions Edward Snowden on board with France and Portugal accused of refusing entry to their airspace, with plane forced to Land in Vienna due to pressure of US State Department
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/03/edward-snowden...
A common theme in the last two cases is that the perpetrators did not actually force the plane to land in their own territory. They merely refused entry, forcing the plane to divert to a third country. This means that if they wanted somebody detained, they needed cooperation from that third country. Which only works if the person to be detailed had done something that is also illegal in that third country.
This is different from AnthonyMouse's scenario. Let's return to the hypothetical example of the UK messing with a JFK-CDG flight. The UK can refuse entry to their airspace, "pushing" your plane away. So you might have to refuel in Ireland and enter France over its Atlantic coast instead of crossing Southern England. But you will not be "pulled" into the UK, unless Keir Starmer fancies being treated like Lukashenko in the eyes of the world.
The only example of an actual forced landing is the EgyptAir, which was 40 years ago and had hijackers on board. I'll leave it to you to decide whether that's enough of a precedent to justify being paranoid today.
This isn’t about visiting for shopping. Billions of people, the vast majority of humanity, manage just fine without ever taking a holiday in the US.
What matters is if any of their assets are ever denominated in USD, or ever use the international banking system that is also controlled by the US. No other country has that kind of long arm jurisdiction.
The thing I can't understand is that people keep bringing this up as if it's supposed to justify doing it because the US could actually make it work, but then there are still a zillion offshore internet casinos which is strong direct empirical evidence that it does not in fact work.
Countries do things like this when they're run by fools and they can do this because the fools have weapons and prisons. What good has it done the US? Can US patrons of offshore internet Bitcoin casinos no longer find them available? Not a chance.
But then on top of being completely ineffective, it causes exactly what you're saying -- other fools in other countries want to treat the foolishness as precedent for doing it themselves.
Which is why the people in the various countries should put a stop to all of it, before it spreads and they find themselves in a foreign prison because their flight had a layover in a country with a law they didn't know about. And countries themselves should retaliate like hell whenever anyone tries to do it to one of their citizens.